More than a collection of best practices, the Litmus Email Design Conference lineup of speakers provided specific tools for creating successful email campaigns. This year’s presentations included information for content marketing, design, and development. Overall, I was amazed by the information I gathered for approaches to mobile email design and content production. Here are my top three favorite presentations and why.

Cindy White and Faith Albers demonstrated processes Plow & Hearth is using to create mobile-specific email templates for its email sends. This duo started with their goals to plan templates that were tailored to their sending calendar and volume. In addition, A/B tests were performed before and after the template updates to track the execution of the new template design. This resulted in relocating elements such as social icons and navigation bars and creating buttons for mobile environments. The team benefited from having a group of specific templates that use hybrid and responsive approaches. The collaboration helped nontechnical users produce content without knowledge of the technical requirements of the responsive code.

The iContact Design Services team is composed of a team of design experts who work with the iContact Strategic Advisors team. The iContact Design Services team is unique in that we code and design our own emails. This workflow helps us to be able to plan the execution of our mobile-responsive emails. This presentation is helping me to ask more pertinent questions as I build templates that relate to the clients’ sending schedule and environment. As we grow and develop new offerings for our clients, this information will help shape our email layouts and motivate us to research ways to streamline the production process for our clients.

This joint presentation featured various types of design solutions for email campaigns and layouts. Mike Nelson discussed the most popular designs from the curated website ReallyGoodEmails.com. These designs feature horizontal blocks, exciting uses of color, and simple layouts. Carl Sednaoui and Tom Buchok from MailCharts shared professional approaches for “Win Back” campaigns and transactional emails. The suggestion to go through all steps of the transaction, including purchasing, improves the user experience and minimizes errors. For anyone who has run out of ideas or needs a solution for an email dilemma, these examples can help get you started making awesome emails.

What stuck out to me the most is the minimalistic approach to the layouts and the great use of space. For example, the design for Fancy Hands is simple and transfers to a mobile environment easily. Curated emails are a great asset for email marketers who are working to generate motivating email messages. Need more inspiration? Check out custom templates created by iContact Design Services on our Pinterest Board.Inspiration Rating: A+

This presentation was filled with creative approaches to writing content and creating imagery to show empathy for the customer. The subject lines and headlines were used to generate sympathy for common worksite issues that happen with time management, and visuals were created to emphasize those annoyances. For example, “Just Pulled Another Payroll All-Nighter” was used to address the long hours spent working with payroll issues. With this approach, the marketing team is able to eliminate elements that were distracting and focus the content to the “pain points” experienced by their customers. What resulted is a combination of well-written copy along with powerful images that demonstrate the frustrations associated with workforce management.

I was also inspired by Shaimoom Newaz’s great use of humor to channel ExakTime’s email campaign. Having deep customer insight is important to help designers choose the appropriate colors, styles, and layout to create a positive and memorable experience. These methods help our teams develop ways to offer more strategies that focus our emails by appealing to the psychological situations associated with a product or service. We can research common issues and use these ideas to create heartwarming and thoughtful content that inspires.

Quality Rating: A+

As an email designer, I am able to use this experience to plan emails that hold up to various audiences and environments. The collection of tools and tricks I learned will help our team become more resourceful for iContact clients and the design community. I left the conference inspired to create better emails through testing, analyzing data, and using the results to make changes to the workflow and the layout of the email.

Did you attend the Litmus Email Design Conference? Is there anything that inspired you? Tell us what you think in the comments section below.